Lorxus Does Budget Inkhaven Again: 04/22~04/28

Lorxus
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:07:25 GMT

I'm doing Budget Inkhaven again! (I didn't realize last time that "Halfhaven" also meant specifically shooting for half-length posts, too.) I've decided to post these in weekly batches. This is the fourth of five. I'm posting these here because Blogspot's comment apparatus sucks and also because no one will comment otherwise.

22. The Prepared Practitioner

Listen: I am a fan of the OSHA-coded "dumbass-positive" frame, in which every skill check needed to navigate daily life is a trip hazard to be avoided. Every scrap of effort and thought that you devote to dealing with mundane preventable issues is a scrap that can't be put towards anything interesting and exciting, and every avoidable risk taken and morale lost is a bit of capacity lost, one more nudge towards the edge of your control envelope. Such can and should be avoid. But even the most skilled practitioner is severely hampered without their tools and assorted consumables. If you have a backpack, fair-sized purse, or messenger bag, there's lots of things you can carry with outsized benefits for the weight and cost. And wouldn't you like to acquire a reputation for being able to shove your arm deep into your Bag of Holding to pull out just the thing for any given pending crisis? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and you can do anything with time to prepare.

23. Seven-ish Affixes From My Thought-Language

[Language] doesn't just have an embarassment of riches of carefully crafted words - it also has a plethora of assorted affixes for modifying, modulating, and changing the role of those words. They tend to be much simpler and easier to explain than the words themselves, and in particular I've left out common ones like nominalizers (turn a verb-like predicate into a noun-like predicate), abstractors (turn a verb- or adjective- like predicate X into things like "the act of X" or "the extent of X" or "the abstract property of X-ness" or "the idea of X"), and "-ize", i.e. "to make a thing into an X/have property X".

24. Don't Replace Your Brain (High Actuation and Prosthetic Executive Function in the Age of AI)

And SB's post is not where IL's link brought me. It brought me to a bluesky post by a self-described doll taking it/its pronouns who notes precisely that; that having had the heuristic that confidence means correctness and an authoritative tone calls for deference and obedience shattered early and repeatedly, you learn very quickly that you can't trust who those people tell you that you are. You learn to construct yourself against the grain of society and those confidently wrong voices, set your weight into an epistemic posture that can't really be taught in classrooms, not unless you're lucky enough to have a teacher ballsy enough to deliberately lie to you. You pick that up much more readily from being marginalized, from having to think for yourself because no one else can be trusted to do it for you. This is a point that SB's article dances around but never quite touches on - the demographic and socioeconomic nature of who has what experiences, learns which lessons, and has what sort of frame for interacting with LLMs, for better and for worse.

25. Bounty Out of Season and How to Preserve It (and How to Use Jam to Ease Friction)

Someday you'll be up for it again. Someday, you'll be able to enjoy the jam you set aside, even if you prefer fresh berries.

26. Chump Checks

Yes, I'm aware that just as all the above are Goodhartable if they're too widely known, and that these might end up being less effective chump checks now that I've mentioned them. So this isn't remotely all of my chump checks; just a few of the most notable...

27. The Last Enemy That Shall Be Defeated is Ignorance

For fire burns as well as warms and lights, and knowledge reveals both wonders and horrors, and power can be used both well and poorly. Not all of wisdom brings joy; ignorance is indeed bliss, but it is the bliss of those who dine on poppies and lotuses. And knowledge has its price in tweaks to your brain and marks on your soul, but that pain is the pain of excited overexertion, of a hard day's fullfilling work, of a cleansing grief; the pain that unambiguously tells you that you are alive.

28. I Don't Like It But I Think That It's True (And Thus There To Be Lived, To Be Interacted With)

This distinction keeps on showing up: wishful thinking costs you agency, because you keep making plans for a world you're not in. Denial costs you agency because you can't navigate around the obstacles that you refuse to see. Both of them leave you less able to act effectively in the world as it really is. But unless you open your eyes and see clearly, whatever the cost in pain, you'll never find the real paths, narrow that they are. A documented paper trail when dealing with someone reliable, no matter the logistical and social cost. A backup plan when you quietly admit to yourself that you can't count on Plan A. A refundable fare you book, even though it costs you more, because you aren't sure whether a beautiful commitment will hold. Adjusting your expectations lower and lower yet when you're operating under constraints that shouldn't be there, but all the same - are.

Discuss